It Could Be the Age of the Chicken, Geologically
Source: New York Times
It Could Be the Age of the Chicken, Geologically
With 65 billion chickens consumed each year, the signature fossil of the modern epoch may be the leftovers.
By James Gorman
Dec. 11, 2018
It’s one thing to eat chicken every day. It’s something else to have that on your permanent record, as in the geological record, the remnants of our time that archaeologists or aliens of the future will sift through to determine who we were and how we shaped our world.
But a group of scientists argue in a new essay published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science that this is exactly how our time on Earth will be marked, by leftover chicken bones. We live in the Age of the Chicken.
There are about 23 billion chickens on Earth at any given time, at least ten times more than any other bird, forty times the number of sparrows. The second most numerous bird on the planet, at an estimated population of 1.5 billion, is a small creature called the red-billed quelea, sometimes known in its home of sub-Saharan Africa as a feathered locust.
The combined mass of those 23 billion chickens is greater than that of all the other birds on Earth. But, said Carys Bennett, an honorary fellow at the University of Leicester and one of the authors of the essay, it’s not only the mind-boggling numbers of chickens that will tell a tale of our times, but their shape, genes and chemistry.
“We have changed the actual biology of the chicken,” she said.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/science/chicken-anthropocene-archaeology.html
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